Although children may productively use concrete nouns after limited exposure, complete mastery of adult-like patterns of noun usage can take up to 14 years. We evaluated whether a transition from universal to language-specific naming is part of the refinement in later lexical development, and we compared how this refinement plays out in…

Usage patterns for common nouns continue to change well past the early years of language acquisition in free naming (Andersen, 1975; Ameel, Malt, & Storms, 2008). The current research evaluates whether this continued evolution is shown in receptive judgments as well, given their differing cognitive demands. We found an extended learning…

Although there is considerable evidence that nouns highlight category-based commonalities, including both those that are perceptually available and those that reflect underlying conceptual similarity, some have claimed that words function merely as features of objects. Here, we directly test these alternative accounts. Four-year-olds (n = 140)…